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THIS ARTICLE SUMMARIZES THE GOALS OF THE NUCLEAR NONPROLIFERATION TREATY AND LISTS THE SIGNATORIES ALONG WITH THE DATE EACH COUNTRY SIGNED THE TREATY, THE DEPOSITED RATIFICATIONS, AND THE DEPOSITED ACCESSIONS.

Since 1945, states in the international system have cooperated heavily to reduce the threats from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, but their strategies have differed significantly. For nuclear weapons, states made use of international organizations from an early point, delegating significant authority to define, monitor, and enforce a collective bargain. In contrast, such an act of delegation occurred much later for chemical weapons and not at all for biological weapons. This dissertation argues that international cooperation on nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons issues requires states to perceive significant threats from NBCWs and share general preferences over strategies for dealing with these threats. However, delegation to an international agent is costly and therefore should occur only when an international agent is valuable for overcoming the many possible barriers to cooperation. I show international organizations can be more efficient producers of information, can be safer and more reliable as informational intermediaries, and can reduce the costs of enforcing an NBCW agreement

One way nuclear agreements might keep signatories from proliferating is by constraining nuclear capacity. Theoretical work on nonproliferation often points to such constraints as an important driver of nonproliferation success. Some have argued that, absent sufficient constraint, states with the desire and capability to proliferate will do so. Faced with more costly routes to a weapon, states subject to technological constraint may abide by the terms of the deal. This perspective poses an important empirical question: do nonproliferation agreements result in significant technological constraint in practice? This article evaluates the empirical prevalence of constraints arising from nonproliferation deals. Doing so requires (1) providing an appropriate measure of nuclear proficiency and (2) developing an estimate of the counterfactual, no-agreement capacity of states that received such agreements. This study addresses both of these points. First, new data are gathered to estimate proficiency, improving upon existing measures in the literature. Second, the generalized synthetic control method is applied to estimate counterfactual proficiency levels for the recipients of agreements. With this approach, the constraining effects of deals the United States implemented with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and the Declaration of Iguaçu between Brazil and Argentina are evaluated. The findings indicate that the constraining effect of these nonproliferation agreements is minimal.